 Bismillahir rahmanir raheem, alhamdulillahir raheem, wa salatu wa salam, ala'a as-sharaf al-amdiyaa, wa al-mursaleen, sayyidina Muhammad, wa ala alihi wa sahbihi, ajma'een. Allahumma, allimna ma yanfa'una wa anfa'na bima'a allamtana wa zidna ilman nafyaan wa ba'a. Prophet Sahib was reported as a narrator in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, reported by Abu Huraira, radi Allahu an. Look at those below you, in a worse position than you. And don't look at those above you in a better position than you, for it is the best way not to belittle the favors of Allah. And so what we learned from this hadith is a way to maximize our gratitude. So one way to approach life is to constantly compare ourselves to people better than us or constantly compare ourselves to how things could have been, like some perceived future version of ourselves that is better than what it could have been or some perceived version of the past of ourselves that could have been better or just comparing ourselves to other people that we feel are, quote unquote, in a better position, whether that be in terms of prestige or finances or life circumstance, so on and so forth. Another possibility is to do the opposite, that you can look at people who are in a worse position than you. Now, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is teaching us that we should look at those people that are in a difficult position, a worse position than us and not look at those people that are in a better position than us because this is the best way to maximize our gratitude and the best way to maximize our understanding of the Netmah of Allah, the blessings of Allah. Now, you can do both of those options, one of the options, looking at people that are in a better position than us, it tends to lead to feelings of disappointment, hopelessness, maybe resentment, looking at people who are in a worse or more difficult position than us, tends to lead to the opposite, feelings of gratitude, feelings of fulfillment, the glass is now full instead of half full, it puts us in a better place. One of the most common exercises in recovery, a way to practically practice this gem is to create a gratitude list. This is something that is a tradition in recovery and that would be recovery from drugs and alcohol addiction and addiction in general is to create a list, like you can get an index card and just write down 10 things that you're grateful for. And then what I would recommend, since this is sort of like a tried and true path, if it's made it this far in the recovery conversation, if it's stood the test of time, it's a tried and true path that you'll hear about passed down, I would take it seriously. And what I would do is I would write it down, 10 things that you're grateful for. And that's it, keep that card in your wallet, in your purse, on your property, on yourself, you can put it in your cell phone and then constantly return to it, constantly look at it and it will help you incredibly in early recovery. If you specifically look at all the neurological deficits that occur from drug and alcohol use and substance use and addictive behaviors in general, a lot of people in early recovery are just depleted neurochemically and are in a state that is not good or doesn't feel good. A gratitude list is an easy way to squeeze some feelings of goodness out of our brain. In other words, look, you have a brain, you can use drugs and alcohol. Drugs and alcohol go into your blood system, go into your brain and release those feel good chemicals. That's one way you can feel better. Another way is that you can manipulate your brain in other ways. You can manipulate your brain by seeing something beautiful, like a beautiful sunset. So you see something that hits your brain and it makes you feel better. Another way is thoughts. You can look at thoughts like drugs. If you ingest the right thoughts, they'll lead you to feeling better. If you ingest the wrong thoughts, they'll lead you to feeling worse. And the goal is not necessarily just making yourself feeling better or worse. The goal is to get yourself to a place where you're feeling in a way that makes you more optimal for success. So feeling bad all the time is gonna put you one step closer to using and feeling good all the time is gonna be a protective factor of you staying away from drugs and alcohol. Just purely from the perspective of logic and strategy, you should constantly try to be feeling as balanced and as fulfilled and as that piece as possible. Sure, there's gonna be ups and downs, but the way that we manage those ups and downs or the way that we ground ourselves through those ups and downs are gonna be incredibly important. So you wanna look at it from the perspective logically and strategically as if you're in a better state, you'll achieve better things, meaning sobriety and just in general, you'll be more effective in life. But then also you wanna look at from the perspective of truth. What's the truth? And the truth is if we were to count the blessings of Allah, we would not be able to count them. And the truth is in the way that the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi sallam, nudges us towards in terms of how we should frame the world, which is to look, look towards somebody that's in a worse position than you and do not look at those who are in a better position for you, for it's the best way not to belittle the favors of Allah, ne'amatallah, the favors, the blessings of Allah. So not only is it simply an act of obedience and thus worship to think in this manner or have these thoughts, it's also something that's gonna lead to more peace and happiness in our lives. So what I would strongly recommend everybody to get the most out of this is to, why don't we start by just typing in, typing two or three things into the chat that we're grateful for. So we can make this a little bit interactive and inshallah what I would recommend you do is write about 10 things when you get offline to keep on you and then consistently return to it and just like an experiment, just out of curiosity, just to mess with your head a little bit. Do it for a week, write down 10 things and then return to them every day and just see what it does and we'll talk about it next week inshallah. Those are all great things that everybody's putting in. So I would go ahead and put that down on paper and like an index card or on your phone somewhere and then practice maybe once a day, pulling it out. You know, one way I heard of it being done which I think is a good way is around the salah time. So pick a salah out of the day and read it during that time or you can just mentally go over it because it'll probably be fresh in your mind if you make it into a practice and then you eventually just make it as part of your dua, make it as part of your dua because praising Allah and being grateful to Him is part of dua and if you can make it something specific to your life then it becomes a little bit more intimate. It's easy to, one of the things that we tend to do in early recovery or when we're new to recovery is to look at the differences. So somebody who smokes crack cocaine might look at somebody who uses another drug and see differences. Somebody who smokes marijuana might look at somebody else and see differences. Somebody who's using pornography might look at somebody with a different addiction and see differences. And so what you wanna do, and you can do that, even two people that smoke marijuana might see differences in each other. Even if they have the same drug use history, they might just look at cultural differences and they might look at other differences, demographic differences. What tends to happen as people progress or one of the things that I see is they start to look at commonalities and they start to see the commonalities in their drug use or their addiction, like cravings, triggers, loss of control, consequences and although there may be varying degrees or varying flavors of that, they're able to really benefit from everybody else's experiences. You really wanna be able to look at the commonalities and let all the differences fly. It's not uncommon to see people who can because they've kind of been through their trenches together or been through the same things together really bond over those difficulties and understand different types of people or have a shared experience despite their differences. I'm gonna go ahead and start with the text. What we went into last time was taking stock of your social support networks. We talked about safety nuts versus risky relationships and then we said that there's certain relationships you would avoid, certain relationships you would limit contact with and certain relationships you would set limits with. So relationships you would avoid, that's pretty clear. Limit contact are people that are risky but you still have to see them at work or something like that. So you just limit your contact with them. You spend as much time as you need with them and then move on. Then there's people that you can't limit your contact with. Let's say they're a spouse or a family member. I mean, you can still limit contact or avoid people but let's say you're in a circumstance where you can't do that. Then they talk about another option which is set limits. These are people that you have to be in contact with but you wanna set limits with them. So it goes into now we're going into the news section or the new part which is page 69, setting limits assertive communication. So they talk about what passive communication is and I think this is really important because I see this come up a lot in just recovery in general and this is a really important concept to sort of master in recovery is communication. Oftentimes you can almost say by default there's passive aggressive communication and we usually focus on the aggressive communication and our wins from that as proof that we know how to set boundaries. And a lot of times we minimize the passive communication that leads up to needing to have that aggressive communication. So it talks about passive communication. If you're passive, you tend to keep your feelings inside. You tend to avoid making requests of other people and you keep what you want and your needs to yourself. The other extreme is aggressive communication bottom of page 69. Aggressive communication tends to demand what you want take advantage of others and deliver that communication in a hostile, rude or angry tone. And it tends to disrespect others which can also have an isolating effect from others. Assertive communication revolves around speaking respectfully. You can make requests to others without coming across as demanding and then there's more of a give and take and it's more effective. It goes over an example of this I'm gonna skip that and go to the next section which is listen carefully on page 72. It says good communication starts with listening. So when you show others that you're listening to them it helps strengthen the connection between you so that both you and the person that you're talking to can be open about your feelings and you can come to a better understanding. Then it goes over some bullet points of verbal listening skills which is like summarizing what the other person is saying asking questions to clarify your understanding of what they said, like how, why, or just using body language like nodding, making eye contact using facial expressions that express that and then keeping distractions like your phone away from mute so that it shows that you're interested. But here's what they say. They say using eye statements when you eventually respond. So all of that was listening but when you eventually respond using eye statements so that you come across as owning your feelings and avoiding blame or making false assumptions about the other person. So for example, instead of saying your anger triggers me to want to use you could say sometimes I feel like you're angry with me so I feel like you're angry with me and I don't cope with that very well. So you see the difference. One is putting the responsibility in somebody else's hand your anger triggers me. The other one is putting the responsibility on our hands and that gives us more of a locus of control to improve ourselves. And honestly, this is such an important part in recovery. Just using this language at least internally helps us frame problems. So one of the things I do is I'll talk to people who have relapsed recently and I'll say what happened? And then I'll hear the story and then they'll say I relapsed because of X, Y and Z. And that's how you can almost test somebody as to where they're at in their recovery just based on the way they handle a relapse or they talk about a relapse or they frame a relapse. Of course we give people the benefit of the doubt and maybe they're just kind of like not using the right words and they mean something different. But the difference between that and somebody who says I relapsed because this happened in my life and I didn't have the coping skills. I didn't master the coping skills yet. It's not a criticism. It's more recognizing that there's room for improvement because what you can do with that is you can save yourself from the next relapse. Look, if the relapse was like an act of God that you had no control over, then you got to spend the rest of your life worrying about when the next random event's gonna happen. But if the relapse was something that I did that the way I responded to it, now it's no longer I have to walk around on eggshells and relapses is gonna come and snatch me up. Now I can practice and exercise a little bit. I got something to do. I got something to work on. So it's not a criticism. It's more so the empowering standpoint. It's the empowering stance to take in order to be successful. But this isn't just relapse. And in fact, all the things we talk about can be applied at every stage in recovery. So communication, it's not just about how do I communicate with somebody and tell them I don't wanna use. Communication is through every stage of recovery. How do I communicate in the sober living home? The sober living home is a great example of bringing to the surface so many issues that you can work on that won't happen outside of the sober living home or the rehab or the therapist's office. You can go through life and have many things to work on, but never, but they just operate subconsciously within you. When you go into recovery environments like rehab, meetings, sober living homes, they tend to get tested. We tend to be able to see ourselves in the mirror more and there are excellent opportunities to then when we see it identify. Because they have the problem with us or I can speak about myself, half of my problem is just not being aware of the things that I need to work on. And then once you become aware of it, then there's the whole other journey of practicing how to change. And so the blessing of being in these recovery environments is just that, is being able to bring to the surface those things that might not necessarily come to the surface. All right, so the next section is asked for what you need. So being assertive is asking for what you need and it's how you ask for what you need. Being passive is not asking for what you need or sort of pretending or minimizing that you need something. What they discuss on page 74 at the top is one way to do this is to express your feelings as they relate to what you're asking for. The phrase would look like this, I feel blank when blank. So I feel bad when you get angry at me and I need blank. So you don't have to say it like that. You could just, that's the concept, that's the formula, you wanna make it your own and say it how you would say it. But the idea, the principle behind it is you wanna frame the situation in a way where you get to take responsibility over it. You don't let anybody else steal that from you. And that way you're in an empowering position and that's success, that's success. And then it talks about some of the ways that you might use the assertiveness skills you're learning include. Number one, asking people close to you who have been affected by your addiction not to repeatedly bring up the ways that they've been hurt or upset by your addictive behaviors. I'm gonna repeat that one. Some of the ways you might use the assertiveness skills you are learning include asking the people around you not to repeatedly bring up the ways that you've hurt them or upset them. So again, this is not talking about people who use drugs and alcohol around you. This is talking about being assertive around creating a recovery environment that's not gonna drag you down. Not to say that they're being upset with this is not justified, but in the end of the day the goal is recovery for everyone. The second bullet point, asking your loved ones to be patient with you during your recovery if you're emotionally up and down or if you just need some time to yourself. Early recovery, first year recovery, first three months of recovery, first weeks of recovery. There's a lot of ups and downs and a lot of roller coasters. So identifying when you just need some space. Maybe it's anger, you just need some space. Maybe it's something else, feeling low, you just need some space, you can let people know that and however way, whatever language you need. And then it goes and it says explaining how certain behaviors of others may be triggering for you or affect you. And then finally asking a loved one to come to counseling with you to better understand how to support your recovery. So then it goes into exercise 4.5 which is practice assertive communication but I'm gonna end here. Any questions, comments, thoughts?